Dowbrigade

We
Mac users rarely get to feel jealous of our Wintel colleagues, but are
big enough to admit it when we do. Up until about ten minutes ago my
giddy exuberance over
blogging was naggingly tempered by the inability of my browser of
choice (Safari) to utilze or even display the extremely
cool  formatting pallette
which appears above the text entry window in the
“Create  News Item” page of Manila. Manila, of course, is the blogging software of choice at the Berkman  Center, our host, and the tool with which Dowbrigade is created.

Up
until now, in order to create tables or links, insert graphics,
arrange  the elements of a posting and change text attributes like
size and color,   I needed to create my posts in Dreamweaver
MX and then copy and past  the html into the more limited version
of the page displayed by Safari,  IE or Navigator on the Mac.

Then last night Dave Winer,
the ultimate Manila resource person, informed me that the tags that
allow the pallette to appear ARE supported by Mozilla, so I fired up a
recent implementation  of the open-source browser called Firebird,   and Voila! Instant formatting!

 It will take me a while to get used to the new interface
and see how far I can take it. I can still use Safari, which I love for
its speed, stability and tabbed browsing. Not often one can have one’s
cake and  eat it too. Now, for being smug, it won’t
work.

endnote: As predicted, my premature
self-congratulations proved, well, 
premature.  I will keep experimenting to find the optimal blend of
tools and styles.